August 27, 2007

What Is the Future Of MyBlogLog?

MyBlogLog offers an interesting service for bloggers aiming to find out who visits their pages, who is part of their blog's community, and also offers a directory service aimed to finding you new blogs to add to your own reading list.

(Oddly enough, the site's e-mail listed for new target hires was the same gentleman who shortly thereafter wrote he was "pulling up stakes" and leaving, which doesn't bode well. But as we know, luckily, a service usually isn't one person deep.)

The biggest innovations from MyBlogLog this summer were the introduction of "Community Messaging", where a site owner could "blast" community members with a message directly to their own MyBlogLog pages, to alert them of news, poll them or simply gain feedback; the introduction of extensive tagging, and continued to work on efforts to weed out spam across the service.

I use MyBlogLog as a widget on this blog to see faces of visitors I know well, and I use my own MyBlogLog page to track site visit statistics, and to watch any day to day additions to the louisgray.com community, a small, but loyal, group. While I enjoy the service, I believe I'm either not using MyBlogLog to its fullest potential, or hope the service has many more updates to soon debut to keep it on the cutting edge.

First, I hope the service can recognize what it is not. It is not a social network, like Facebook. While they've erred on that side before, with the addition of Twitter status updates, for example, MyBlogLog is exactly what its name implies - it is My Blog's Log, not My Personal Log. As a result, the site should focus on information relevant to the blog as an entity - including statistics of visitors, and individuals, as well as most frequently read pages, most common incoming and outgoing links, as it does today.

Second, I hope it can focus. If it's to become one of my go-to site statistics hubs, it should have more than just one day's data available at one time, but should instead show trends for daily visits, pages, and even visitors. If it can track an individual in my community came to my page, there's no reason it can't flip on the Big Brother switch and show me how many times that one individual visited my site in the last 7, 30 or 90 days. In theory, MyBlogLog is tracking more data than does SiteMeter and even Google Analytics, and is sitting on a gold mine for individual bloggers here.

Third, as MyBlogLog shows me who is a member of my community, and has the option to show me what additional communities those members are part of, in theory, MyBlogLog could say, for instance, "You and Geekwhat have three communities in common," or taking it a step further, the site could show me who else out there shares many of my own communities. If I am a member of 34 communities, and ParisLemon is a member of 27 of those (I made that up), then those communities we don't share just might be of interest to the other. Using this theoretical search tool, I could also be able to find new people who just might be interested in louisgray.com and have the option to leave them a private message invitation.

MyBlogLog is an interesting service today. It could become a great service tomorrow, with just a few tweaks. Right now, given the site's gaining a bad name for spammers and faux IDs, combined with its low profile after the Yahoo! acquisition, I get the feeling they've stalled momentum. Is the service planning to expand to the fore, as it could, or instead, will it be folded into the Yahoo! behemoth, never to escape? Many bloggers await the answer.

(This post also will be sent to the louisgray.com community as a trial run of that service)

7 comments:

Louis, I believe you are dead-on the money with this one. MyBlogLog should take a slight turn and shift it's look a bit as well towards something more slick in it's identity as well. Something that speaks to blog authors who write professional blogs, not just personal blogs. Adding beefier stats would help move it in that direction. I would not think of subscribing to their paid service, as it doesn't seem any more valuable than what I already get for free from Google Analytics.

Thanks for your comments. We're alive and well thanks and have been busy on some features (such as an API) that have shifted our focus away from the user interface but will set us up to be much more flexible going forward.

While I would agree with you that we've got some unique stats about your sites' readership that we could do a better job surfacing, we also have a wealth of information about your MyBlogLog readers that would help fill out your understanding of who your readers are and what they are collectively interested in. Feel free to drop some of your thoughts into our Suggestions area at the footer of each page and start a discussion. The team looks at this area closely for inspiration and it'd be great to capture your thoughts here and have others vote/comment on your thoughts.

Ian, thanks for the note. I've found the best way to interface with companies who have great services is to do so here in the public forum, as often there are others who share similar opinions. I'm looking forward to new features from your team and am eager to see continued upgrades.

Yeah I'm wondering about where they will go as well, good to see ian kennedy responding above.

whatever they do to change/add features I hope they don't bloat the javascript that goes on each site - to me that is one of the best features, that it loads relatively fast and give me very accurate pretty much real time traffic data. it's much more real time then say Google Analytics even.

it's also interesting that it's been almost 9 months since Yahoo purchased them, yet I wouldn't say that they feel really at all like a Yahoo product yet - I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

I don't mind showing up on this site, but it's disconcerting when I'm casually checking out someone's site, scrolling down the page, and up pops my photo. If I ever get around to figuring out my login/password again, I think I'll turn it off.